Monday, January 19, 2009

People often look at things not in a direct manner, I mean, not in a straight line. I myself seldom look at things permanently. I take many things into consideration before diving into decisions and actions that I will take.

The same goes to searchers in the web. They do not just go and search by the use of a certain keyword and then click the first organic result of a search engine. They first think and consider their needs why they are trying to make a search. They also take into consideration how enticing and how unique the certain title of a page. And is they find nothing interesting, they go ahead and make another search in another search engine with the use of the same keywords. Current events also trigger changes on the searcher's needs. Yet, when your site is being displayed on the top portion of the search engine results pages, you have better chances of enviting users to view and visit your site.

In order for one to to rank high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), one must take into consideration the most keywords that are being used on a certain period of time. In other words, use the most popular ones. Befriend keywords because they, too, are the searcher's best friend. The internet offers great tools that would be able to predict and analyze the projection of a certain keyword popularity. Use these to take advantage of the situation. Use the most recent and the most used keywords to be put into your site. By doing so, one would have more chances of showing up in the high ranking positions in the SERPs.

It is also a great advantage to put human touch in your pages. Most people are not just searching for information, most people wants to connect with the information. Thus, be careful of the words and the content that you use.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

If you are not into online marketing, you probably haven't heard or if you did, you must not be that familiar with what PageRank is. But what is PageRank? Is it that important?

PageRank, according to Wikipedia, is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.In other words, it is a tool used by search engines to analyze the importance of a webpage by checking on the links that connect to it. The greater the number of links, the better. The higher the PageRank of the page of that link , the more importance is given to your page. The more important your page is, the higher your PageRank will be. When the PageRank is high, it gets better ranking on the search engine results pages.

But the numbers aren't that important. Quality links means more than it.

The history of the PageRank is as old as Google itself. According to the same Wikipedia page:

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.

PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania, and Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. By following links from one page to another, virtual communities of webpages are found. Web link analysis was first developed by Jon Kleinberg and his team while working on the CLEVER project at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

PageRank changes once in a while. As updates on the content are made, the importance of the specific page also changes. For example, this blog, at the time of this post has a PageRank of 2, but may go up or down as new posts are added.

There are many tools that calculates shows the PageRank of a page. One most commonly used and trusted tool is the google toolbar.

This summarizes what PageRank is. In future posts, we will discuss the main concept and algorithm of PageRank in detail, but I'll post updates on this page too.

Friday, December 19, 2008

An old woman, in search for different kinds of apples, went to Google and made a search. To her surprise, the search engine has given a lot of search results for a single website alone. Nothing seems to be wrong with the title that appears but when she clicked on it, voila!, crappy and useless texts were posted on her monitor. After that, the old woman, as vengeful as she is, vowed never to visit that site again.

Sounds unreal, but, well, it could happen.

To optimize a website to be able to rank high on search engines, there are a lot of things that needs to be done. Build quality links, submit related articles, submit site to online directories, etc. Being too busy of taking care of these task, oftentimes, search engine optimizers and internet marketers forget one of the important, if not the most important, concepts and ideas to build traffic into the web pages. First things first. Offer quality content on your site.

Along with quality content of course is the correct link building process. Links should only be given and provided to related websites. Another is to put in the correct and updated title tags, meta keywords and description is also part of providing quality into the site. By building good links and optimizing the website, one can get better shot at the search engine result pages.But the main point is, what is the purpose of bringing in people to visit your site and creating traffic into it, if there is nothing there that would be of interest to them. For example, for an information-driven website, it must offer something that would help the target searchers or if not, give them information that they need. Thus, giving them the reason to trust your website and visit it the next time that they would need to search related topics. Another instance is for the online shops, one must provide good details of the products or services that they offer to prevent shoppers to ask questions and to avoid that they would search on a competitor's site because of the lack of information on your side.

To sum it up, the content is the most important part of search engine optimization. It allows users to give their trust and like your website. Who knows, they could even refer it to their friends! It may take a long time to drive traffic because one is limited on the structure of the pages for web crawlers, but don't worry, the wait will all be worth it.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Web maintenance plays a very important role in getting more visitors and more traffic in a website. That is why you need to be very very careful with the steps you make when maintaining a website. I decided to post some tips to follow in order for the website maintenance to be most effective.

Fresh Quality Content Always. The main objective of website maintenance is to keep visitors coming to your site. And the search engines drive great traffic when you update your website from time to time by adding new post. This is the reason why it is very important to add fresh and quality content regularly.

Tracking Visitors. It is also of utmost importance that you keep track of the activities by the individuals who visit your site. Which pages most of the people go to, which pages do they stay the longest and what attracts them most. This would assist you analyze your target audience interests and would help in making decisions for your next update and for the future improvements.

User Feedback. This is also a must for an effective website. Not only it would let people interact with each other, they will be able to give constructive comments and feedbacks that would give more maintenance tips. This can be done by setting up a forum on your website, providing a contact form and letting others to comment on your posts.

Newsletter subscription. Making newsletter subscription feature available would give your visitors an option to know updates made on your site. This would keep previous visitors to visit your website again.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Writing a blog is not as easy as just plain writing. There are things to consider. One don't just go and post something for the sake that he blogs, rather, blogs aims something.

Sure thing, no one is a perfect blogger, myself included. But I decided to post some useful tips that some could follow in order to make an effective blog article and be an interesting blogger. The following are just a few, but these are what is considered to be the basics of blogging.

Make an opinion. People love blogs that are written by people. Do not sound like a robot or a writer for a corporation. Others read to be informed, they hate advertisements. And always do not forget to make a stand on an issue. Blogs can make great influences if written the correct way. Do not stay anonymous on an argument. Make a stand.

Less, short and understandable. A long article is harder to get and easier to forget. A short one would be its opposite. Be direct. Time is very important for you, much more for your readers. Give information as fast as possible yet the simplest as you can.

Make your post easier to read. Maximize spaces. Separate ideas through numbers or bullets. That way, it is much easier to grasp the idea. Create a scan-friendly article. Utilize sub headings, they serve to be friendly for long articles that offer lots of different ideas. This would work best if someone is only looking for a certain line or abstract. Use pictures to replace some of the content. Just be sure to optimize the image.

Be consistent. Do not change your topic from time to time. If possible, focus in only one theme. And be still with your style in writing. People want to know what to expect always.

Maximize your post. Make powerful links to your sources with the use of helpful anchor texts. Maximize the keywords that you focus on writing a certain post. Emphasize them by making them bold or underlining on them.

Edit your post. Correct the mistakes you did. Never hesitate to admit that you did something wrong.

I would also like to stress the fact that successful bloggers do not just blog because they earn money, or it is their job, rather they love what they are doing. Passion is always the key to success in any fields.

Friday, December 12, 2008

How you developed your website contributes greatly on its optimization with the search engines and the success of your website with its marketing.

I formulated a list or tips that would help the design of your website to be search engine optimization friendly.

SEO Friendly URLs. Make sure that the urls that you are using are Search Engine Optimization friendly. By this, I mean that it is better if your targeted keywords would actually be part of it. Avoid characters like "=" or "?", rather use "-" or "_" to separate words. Separating the words are not that important for search engines, yet is suggested so that human visitors of your site would easily understand the content through the clear representation of the url.

Using Semantic Tags. Using semantic tags would help on website development would help the search engines to understand which terms are being emphasized and is put into importance. Use this list to of sematic tags to help you on your web development and website optimization.

Use Text for Navigation. Avoid using flash for the main navigation. Search engine crawlers cannot read flash. If this is used, they will not be able to proceed to the next pages. Yes, the only negative thing about this is that you are sacrificing the attractive designs you are aiming at. This can be, however, fixed by putting a little portion of your webpage at the bottom a sitemap, in which all your main pages will be listed in pure HTML.

Optimizing Images. There are instances that you will be using images to replace the content of your website. The problem is that spiders and crawlers are blind, they are only able to read but they cannot see. Thus, the text placed on the images will be useless. To optimize the images, first, you must be sure that the file name of the image will contain your targeted keywords for displaying the image. Secondly, be sure to put description of what message the image is trying to convey. Place alt tags on your images. Optimize the keywords in it. Lastly, optimize the image size. I would be honest, I hate pages that takes so much time to load, so I think any of you. Make image sizes smaller. It researches has stated that people leave the website if it takes up to 12 seconds to load. Imagine how short it is for web development optimization and how long it is for the browsers.

Optimized Links. Build only quality links. Be sure to use important keywords for your anchor texts. Be sure only to link on important and theme related site. Optimize the link flow of your site by linking to your own site content. Spiders love these.

Keyword Research. Optimize your keywords. Not only use your targeted keywords, explore to related words. If you theme is ice cream, don't focus on ice cream all the time, use other words like chocolate, vanilla, sweet, tasty, etc. Also base your design concept of your theme. Do not make a site full of the color yellow if your theme is blue, the same as to not to use pink if your topic is soccer.

Always be sure to think about how you would react when developing and designing a website. Take constructive comments from other people especially those who know nothing about you.